It seems at the moment I am at my most productive on a Sunday. Saturday seems to start slowly, plus this weekend I was completely shattered which is not great for being creative. Sunday was a different matter! I cleaned down my work desk and decided to leave the boro flowers for a while to use up my soft glass stash. This was about the time I realised how much I’ve come to love off-mandrel working! Twiddling around sticks of bent metal that are covered in potential harmful dust is not ideal (although I still love the smell when first heated, reminds me of my first time bead making.)
Second bead and straight in with 101-stupid-mistakes! ‘Putting hot sticky bead into kiln and touching other hot bead.’ Not a good start, although I think I saved one of them, albeit after having to reshape it again.
So enough with normal beads, thought I’d make some more of my ‘little worlds,’ which I’ve had some nice comments back about this week. I’ve been meaning to make some more for a while, and to try out some new colour combos as well. Suddenly it all clicked again, and from having mandrels sitting around gathering dust, and bead release hardening in the pot, I actually had to raid my drawers for any more I could find – even some part bent ones! I’ve filled the kiln before, but never this much! The kiln turned into a little galaxy of Planets!
I’ve done a good few with the classic deep blue, (as per the picture here) plus more of a nice pale green peridot colour. I’ve not listed any of these yet as for some reason I can’t seem to get any of these to be a close size match yet. I have had a go with some more ‘Mars Red’ and some fab ‘Indigo’ – yet more new colours I have yet to unveil! However I left the best to last, and think I have come up with some of the best little worlds I have EVER made! Even ‘The Boss’ was blown away by them, and that takes some doing! I am really excited about the way these are going now, the three hours for the kiln to cool was torture last night! The only problem I have is I only have a tiny bit of this glass left, and when I checked this morning found out because of the high silver content it’s about 12 times the cost of the normal blue!!!! Ekk!!!!! I will have to ration this stuff!
I will get these cleaned up later this week so I can make some new earring with them, keep a look out for the pictures as these really are worth seeing, until then I’m going to be mean and leave you wondering about them - after all I seem to be Evil ruler of my very own universe of little planets now!
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